ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the general relationship between disciplines and occupations. The development of sociology and economics as organized discourses, or disciplines, has occurred contemporaneously with their increasing use in particular kinds of social intervention. The shift from autonomous scholarship to state-sponsored administrative science has obscured the alternative possible contributions of sociological thought to experienced problems. In so far as the putative subject-matter of economists is also taken to be the fundamental concern of the state and its apparatus, expertise without professionalism becomes an idiosyncratic status granted to academics as a means of incorporation into the state. Two roles which are often adopted and are attempts at authentication by appeal to the traditional organization of knowledge or to other disciplines now effectively dead, are of critic and scholar. Both these are loose versions of a more inclusive role, that of intellectual, which is a fundamental part of the division of labour.
